My name is Matt Nicoll and I am a high school teacher in New Zealand, interested in improving the classroom experience for my students. I am open to trialing new approaches and hope to use this blog to reflect on my ideas and practices.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

Food for Thought

Today we had an ICT Committee Meeting and I was asked to present about Blogging with my Year 9 class. The response was generally very encouraging, but a few things came up that are worth considering:

Student Images

A colleague asked a good question about how I get around getting authority for using images of the students. At this stage, it is not an issue as I make a concerted effort to only use students' first names (not full names or nicknames) when my teaching is filmed and have set rules about images/video being only of me and the work, not of the students. I know I am being a bit over-careful and a lot of students would love to see themselves in the blog, but how do I permit that unless every parent is on board with the idea?

Next year, I intend to inform the parents of the blog and as for permission for images of their respective children to be used on the blog. But how will I manage it if one or two parents do not give consent? Food for thought.....

School Reputation

Another good point made was that we are representing an aspect of our school in a public forum. Currently, the school has no set policy about what is posted on blogs, wikis etc.

There is real potential for these public shared spaces to create negative perceptions about the school. Conversely, by being public, students' extended families and networks can see what is happening at the school and (hopefully) build a very positive opinion; it could be a great (free) marketing tool! Food for thought...

Policies...?

From the discussions today, it was agreed that these issues all need to be considered by the school leaders and we probably need some school policies on them. Or are we being overly cautious?

1 comment:

Hello again MattOne possibility could be to join the myportfolio discussions group and post in a relevant forum there your questions on how schools manage this. Maybe some will share what they do in their school. It is about trying to leverage info from a community of practice and disseminate it further: in publishing your question in a shared space, you flag an issue that is relevant to many and others, in answering your questions , contribute to shared knowledge/know how.